


The Time Travel Problem

by Crowlows19



Category: Batman - All Media Types
Genre: Bruce Wayne is a Good Parent, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-23
Updated: 2019-10-23
Packaged: 2020-12-28 20:56:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,151
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21143081
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crowlows19/pseuds/Crowlows19
Summary: Barry Allen and Clark Kent, follow Bruce around during a time travel mission through Gotham City's recent past. If only Bruce would stay focused.





	The Time Travel Problem

Clark had gone to both Bruce and Barry when he'd needed help tracking down a time-traveling alien through Gotham's recent history. Barry because he knew time travel better than anyone and Bruce because this was about Gotham City. Tracking a time-traveling alien through Bruce’s city was not something any of them had wanted to do. 

Barry had been convinced that it would be okay though. Bruce’s self-control would keep him from changing anything in the timeline, even when he really wanted to, even when it would have been easy to. What they hadn’t expected was for Bruce to be so easily distracted. Every time they turned around, he was gone, observing the past.

00000 

They landed at Gotham General first and it had taken only fifteen minutes for the first sign of trouble to appear. Dressed as orderlies, they made their way through the hospital, following the energy signature of the alien they were looking for. All of a sudden, Clark had looked back and seen that Bruce was no longer following them. 

Instead, he was staring through an open doorway into a room. There was screaming and the sounds of things being ripped open that Clark couldn't quite tune out. They were in the maternity ward and Bruce was watching a child being born. Clark didn't try to find out who it was; the less they interacted with the past the better. He simply took Bruce by the upper arm firmly and led him back to the hunt. 

Bruce didn't say anything or try to stay but there was something in his eyes that Clark didn't like. He tried to ignore the sounds of pain and begging coming from the room. Whoever was in there, was struggling.

"Please, please," the mother begged. "My baby, save my baby."

000000

Bruce disappeared on them again nearly four hours later when it was determined that the alien had moved on. He had picked another point in time. Barry was trying to figure out what that point was when they suddenly became aware that Bruce was no longer standing with them. Clark had sighed and offered to find him while Barry, annoyed, kept working.

Clark found Bruce standing in the NICU, his hands in one of the incubators, comforting one of the infants. The baby, clearly born too early and too small, had one impossibly tiny hand wrapped around Bruce's finger. 

"Do you know who this is?" he asked Clark when he saw him standing there. Clark knew that they should leave but the moment seemed to have its own kind of power and he just couldn't seem to make himself stop it. He shook his head. 

"This is Tim," Bruce replied and Clark felt both relief and total understanding wash over him. Bruce had been watching Tim’s birth in that room; the room that had sounded so horrible. "He was born prematurely you know. He was all twisted up and they almost had to make a choice between saving him and saving his mom. Instead, Janet will get a couple hundred stitches and in about a month they'll diagnose her with postpartum depression when the nurses realize she seems too withdrawn. Tim will spend two months in this incubator before they release him to his parents. He'll have a couple of close calls, his blood pressure will spike, he'll almost lose some intestine to an infection, and they'll wonder quite a bit if he'll live at all." 

Clark finally went to stand on the other side of the incubator and looked down at all the wires attached to the tiny bundle that would one day lead heroes into battle. Tim seemed more wire and machine than baby at the moment. And he looked impossibly tiny with one of Bruce's hands gently stroking what little baby hair he had and the other occupied by that tiny hand wrapped around his finger. He could hear that little baby heartbeat, steady and sure as if nobody had told it that the baby was about to go through hell just to have the privilege to live and grow up.

Clark knew that Bruce had never held one of his children as a baby; they had all come to him much later in life. This would likely be the closest he would ever come to the feeling of having his newborn child in his arms. Clark wasn’t willing to deprive him of that memory. 

"Timothy Jackson," Bruce continued softly, eyes on the baby. "Born July 19th at 5 pounds, 9 ounces around 2:35 am." 

"So, he's always been a night owl then?" Clark teased, finally finding his voice and Bruce managed to laugh a little. 

"A bat," he corrected. Clark opened his mouth to say more but the baby stirred and suddenly Tim's intensely blue eyes were staring up at Bruce. The little baby smiled as if he knew exactly who was there with him, offering what comfort he could. 

"Hey, Timmy," Bruce said quietly. "I'll see you in twelve years, kiddo." Bruce rubbed his thumb over the baby's forehead one last time and gently removed himself from the incubator. By the time they left the room, he was back to himself, in full Batman mode as if the detour had never even happened. 

00000 

The woods outside Wayne Manor were quiet and dark almost to the point of being creepy. Clark certainly didn’t enjoy them and, quite frankly, neither did Barry. But the woods weren’t really the problem. The real problem was that, once again, Bruce had disappeared. 

“It was a bad idea to bring him to his own past,” Barry said as they wandered around, trying to find their wayward teammate. 

They had lost both Bruce and the alien. The sun was setting and Clark was almost entirely certain these woods were haunted. There was rustling in the leaves and underbrush that his hearing couldn’t quite pinpoint. It wasn’t the normal sounds of animals or people. It was something else. He focused his hearing, trying to ignore the goosebumps on his neck, and listened for Bruce’s heartbeat. 

There were two; one in London where the Bruce of this time was currently working on a case and one up ahead on the path where the Bruce of their time was wandering around, looking for something. Clark was fairly certain he knew what. He was almost positive he recognized that other heartbeat. 

He sped up, getting to the clearing where Bruce was currently chatting with what looked like a five-year-old Tim Drake, who, for some inexplicable reason, was holding both a children’s magnifying glass with some sort of film over it and a water gun. He stopped just out of sight of them both, though he doubted his arrival had slipped by Bruce. Barry stopped right beside him.

“Just moved in, huh?” Bruce was saying. “Do you like it?”

“It’s big,” Tim said, kicking at a rock, his voice dripping with frustration. “I keep getting lost.”

“You’ll figure it out eventually,” Bruce replied, and Clark could hear that he was sincerely trying not to laugh. “What are you doing out here though? These woods are haunted.”

Clark wondered if Bruce was teasing Tim or giving him a sincere warning. Would Bruce know what he was talking about if he told him what he could hear?

“There’s monsters too,” Tim supplied helpfully sounding far too excited. “I’m gonna catch it. For science.”

“Oh, yeah?” Bruce said, sounding only vaguely interested and Clark could practically feel Barry vibrating beside him. “What kind of monster?”

“It’s grey and scaly but it can go invisible and I saw it running on its hands sometimes and sometimes on its feet! And it’s super tall! Taller than Batman even! And I’m gonna catch it!” Tim rambled excitedly. Clark almost snorted with laughter. He had never known a Tim Drake this young and innocent. He cast his mind back to the time Dick had told him the story of how they’d met Tim and wondered if Tim already knew Batman’s identity. If he knew who he was talking to, he didn’t let on. 

“And how exactly do you plan to find and catch this tall, invisible monster?” Bruce asked. 

“It leaves footprints!” Tim said, holding out the odd magnifying glass. Bruce took it and used it to examine the ground around him. When he huffed, Clark knew he was seeing something and was impressed. 

“And how do you plan to catch it?” he asked again and this time, Tim held his water gun aloft. 

“I heard it scream when it touched the water in the stream,” he said. “I think water hurts it.”

“Hmm,” Bruce hummed, contemplatively. This was new information to Clark and he looked at Barry who shrugged. 

“Timothy!” they heard suddenly and Clark could hear the faint footsteps of someone approaching them through the woods. 

“Mrs. Mac!” Tim exclaimed and suddenly took off into the trees, running away from the woman as fast as his little legs could carry him. Bruce also ran away, in another direction, and they followed. Clark idly wondered how Tim had even run across the alien in the first place. 

000000

Bruce was convinced that that alien wasn’t stalking Gotham City’s timeline, but rather Tim Drake’s. When they traced it to 10-year-old Tim’s bedroom, Clark was inclined to agree. Barry also agreed, but it made him incredibly nervous when Bruce disappeared again, this time into the bowels of the Drake family mansion. 

“Where did he go this time?” Barry snapped, clearly annoyed.   
“He’s with Tim again,” Clark said, listening as the two talked about invisible monsters, Tim clearly unconcerned about his neighbor suddenly appearing in his kitchen. Clark knew that Tim had yet to be officially introduced to Bruce but knew the secret. He wondered what was going through the boy’s head at that moment. He tuned into their conversation completely when he heard Bruce abruptly shift topics. 

“Why do you keep so many locks on your bedroom door?” Bruce asked. Clark walked over to examine the three deadbolts that Tim had installed.

“The house makes noises when it’s empty,” Tim said. “I sleep better when the door’s locked.” 

Clark knew about how Tim’s parents were never really around. He had never fully considered that their absenteeism would mean that their son was sleeping in a mansion, alone, far from any adult who could help him if he needed it. He imagined that, to a child, every creak was an intruder and every shadow a monster. In Gotham City, there was always the chance that the thing in the shadows was actually there and not just your eyes playing tricks on you. He would have had the locks too if he was Tim. 

Bruce was saved the attempt of formulating a response by the sound of glass being broken. The alien had come through the library window.

000000

It was never really determined why the time-traveling alien had been stalking Tim. They just knew that it had been and Bruce was certain that they would hear about this again. The one they had captured had been brought back to their time for containment but they had no real way to communicate with it. Even the technology in the Fortress of Solitude couldn’t translate for them. 

Wherever the alien was from, the Kryptonians had never explored it. 

Their trip through Tim’s timeline had been an interesting exercise, Clark thought. He had known the boy was both brilliant and a fighter. He hadn’t realized that both of those things had long pre-dated Bruce’s influence. He had always assumed that Tim’s analytical fighting style had been something Bruce had built upon whatever natural talent had already been there. The boy’s nearly unflappable brilliance was all him.

He knew that now. 

Especially considering that when they returned from their time travel to the Batcave, Tim had been there waiting for them with demands that they still owed him for the window the alien had broken nearly eight years ago. 

Apparently Jack and Janet Drake had not accepted their son’s explanation of an invisible alien breaking through their library window and had made Tim pay for the window out of his allowance. This meant that Tim had to give up the computer parts he’d been hoping to buy. And when the boy had figured out that they had been time traveling, he had managed to wait all these years until his demands for retribution would make sense to Bruce.

Clark and Barry had left the cave while Bruce and Tim argued about whose fault it was that a time-traveling alien had been stalking him. They never did find out if Tim won what had sounded like a very well reasoned argument. But knowing Bruce as he did, Clark suspected that Tim never got the money for the window but that Bruce had probably bought him a new computer sometime later anyway.


End file.
